City Without Suns, page 12
“You remember those times when you used to swim in the ocean?”
“Yeah, but I know it was a dream because that’s impossible.”
“Not a dream. It’s a latent memory, dormant and inherited from our original. I have the same ones. Our original lived on Earth, and she did swim in the ocean,” Quasar tried to clarify.
Nobody had ever explained that to Eva before, and she wasn’t sure she believed it. Living in the seclusion of a spaceship, having never seen a sky, she thought pictures and movies created the visions that triggered her dreams. She always anticipated the arrival. The sky over Beta was darker than the one in her fantasies where light blue painted the air instead of a hazy orange. She had a hard time thinking her unconscious experiences consisted of sights from a planet she had never seen.
“They don’t seem real,” Eva argued.
“Just like distant memories, ones you can barely remember, they do not differentiate themselves from dreams. It’s an epigenetic process that we don’t fully understand about clones. I even remember Isla’s dreams. That was her name.”
“Were her dreams like the one I just had?”
“There was one that has become a legend among her clones. There was a skeleton in the dream, but it was different than the one you just had. It was in the dream she had right before she boarded Gambler from Earth. The visage in her dream was supposedly her grandfather and it was urging her to go into space as if he was speaking to her from the grave, a messenger sent by the spirits. She believed at that point it was her destiny to go, but she never figured out why.”
Sent by the spirits. What spirits? Eva wondered.
She was haunted by the thought that her memories were not her own. She wanted to ask more but preferred to forget the imagery she had seen in her sleep, and talking about it was not helping. Eva suddenly wanted to get off the lander even though it was gigantic, like the ship where she grew up. Wanting to get outside, she walked out of her room. Quasar did not follow. The temperature had not yet warmed with the primary star still below the horizon, so Eva would not be able to go outside for a few hours more.
She decided to walk the ship. She really wanted to explore more of the outside, her new home where she would grow old, the land promised and coveted by generations. Wandering the ship was a small consolation, somewhat dissatisfying, but it would have to do. They had only been on Taurus for a short time, less than a day before the landing. She was unfamiliar with it, but for that matter, she was not that familiar with Gambler either even though she had lived there her whole life. There were similarities. They were structured in a radial lattice around a middle core, which on the lander was equipped with a water tank similar but much smaller than the one in the middle of Gambler.
In the lander, the core wrapped around to form a ring that Eva heard others call a torus and wondered if that had anything to do with the name of the ship. Only the bottom portion of the lander was usable under the influence of Beta’s gravity – the top half was designed with rooms oriented for the artificial gravity of the ship when it was rotating around the central engine. Being curious, she wanted to get as high as she could for a view to the outside, so she walked the main corridor in search of the nearest ladder tube. Eva climbed and traversed until she was in a room up high on the perimeter.
The window in the room overlooked the lake and faced the forest with the secondary star low on the horizon. The large body of water looked no smaller from that elevated position than it did on the ground. Its other borders were lined with cliffs of varying sizes, with the ones in the distance barely visible.
At the edge of the forest in the partial darkness of the betanight, Eva could see the tree where Webster had been marking the days. She had not heard a single person other than Webster talk about tracking their days, so it occurred to her that maybe they were losing track of time. She pondered how old she was and tried to figure out the number of days to her birthday, but she didn’t know what day it was. The cycle of the primary star had thrown off their timekeeping. The daytime was about the length of five earth days, but that was not an exact figure. She refused to accept the thought that she was not going to know her exact birthday for sure ever again, but she postponed the calculation until later.
Eva left that room to continue around the slow curve of a perimeter passageway. When she started to get a little bit bored of the windowless corridor, she decided to have another look outside.
The pane of glass she found in another room overlooked the vine-covered plain to the east. Eva wondered how long it would take for the primary star to return and warm the air so she could go back outside. She stared to the place where she anticipated it would appear, but she had no idea how long that would take, and she certainly did not have the patience to wait.
Right before she was about to leave to continue on the walk, she saw a second body on the ground in the plain next to Fedora’s body. She did not know when they had lost another. A second death gave her chills. The possibility of her own death crept into her thoughts. The finality of that hypothetical event bothered her and she couldn’t get her mind around it.
Eva pressed her hands against the cold windows. The bodies were not cold as dead bodies should have been. Areas of fluctuating heat stimulated her retinas. Eva could see the infrared radiation through the dim night. Her first thought was that they were still alive, but then she realized the error. The bodies were covered in bugs. The alien insects that usually appeared one at a time had swarmed to cover the dead people in the field. Eva started to run back and tell someone, but she stopped herself from bringing menacing news that would surely be unwanted. Besides, she didn’t know who to tell.
Instead, Eva left that room to continue her exploration of the Taurus chambers. She arrived at one that faced north to the mountains. In the range that faced her, the peaks were not enough to obstruct the view of the Gambler wreckage. The ship blended with the mountains as if one itself. She recalled the days there when she learned all about how to live on the ship, but nobody ever said how they were going to live there on Beta. Eva felt cold. The ominous remains of the spaceship in the distance demonstrated how small they were.
When she tired of the sight of the mountains, Eva continued around Taurus until she faced west and made one more stop. The main waterfall that fed the giant lake from the mountains was barely visible, a spec in the distant starlight. She had not been there, but she wanted to go. That was where the passage into the mountains allowed entry into the valley where Gambler rested, a venture yet to be undertaken by anyone in the group.
Eva was growing hungry and decided to make her way back to the others. She thought the sunrise must have been coming soon. The dull hum of the reactor was the only sound as she was returning around the arc to where everyone had been sleeping. She liked being alone, but the eerie quiet compelled her to run the final length of her nearly hour-long walk. She approached the gathering where people were stirring in preparation to go outside.
Chapter 32
When the time came for the primary star to rise above the horizon, the sky darkened instead of becoming lighter. A haze thickened in the air until the light from the ever-present second star had been smothered. It was darker outside than Eva had ever seen since the arrival, and even she and Quasar were having a hard time discerning any of the plant life or topography through the south-facing windows.
Toward the lake on the shore in the distance, Eva could see flickering multicolor lights on the beach. She pointed them out to some of the others, but they could not see them. Whatever it was, Eva was the only one detecting the unknown phenomenon. She was curious and wanted to show Quasar. Eva knew she could also see the same things. By the time Eva got to her, the lights were gone. They were so faint that Eva doubted her own sighting and dismissed it as nothing. The outside was once again featureless and black as the air continued to thicken.
The doors were opened out of habit and many made their way to the outside under the cover of Taurus. The temperature was frigid with a blistering bite so cold it felt like a burn. Through the long cavern created by the surface of the lander, Eva could see the far-away figures of some who had exited to observe the exterior conditions. Looking eastward, they stayed within the reaches of Taurus under the shelter it provided and continued to gaze in the direction of the anticipated sunrise.
Eva went outside briefly before Quasar grabbed her hand and escorted her back in. She caught a glimpse of the sky to the east before Quasar pulled her inside. Instead of a rising sun, pitch-black clouds approached from the east, and there was something unusual that she had never noticed before, wind. The air was moving fast.
It gathered momentum until it was making noise as it rushed under and around Taurus. It quickly got louder until the sound made it difficult to hear anyone speak. Eva heard people yelling to communicate at close range and shouting in vain to those trying to make their way back to the lander. Within moments, the figures of the people in the distance were running back, but the increasing winds tried to push them sideways. Some of them fell over before regaining their stride. The last few of them had to crawl along the ground to lessen their resistance to the moving air. Finally, the doors were closed.
Eva followed Webster and Nikolaj down the hall, retracing the beginning of the full-circle she had walked before. They were going to have a look from a southeast facing window. There nothing to do except watch the storm approach and trust that the strength of Taurus was plenty to withstand such an event. Eva was not comforted by the fact it was designed to withstand atmospheric entry despite its ability to float its way down to the planet surface. The noise of the outside winds could not be ignored.
The storm was violent. All the survivors who were not sick watched from the southeast arc as lightning flashed. Noise of the wind was interrupted by the electric discharge exploding onto the ground. The cadence of the thunder grew more rapid, and the claps got louder and louder. It increased until it was close, and then the storm was over them and surrounded the lander on all sides.
Eva did not like the lightning and turned away to run but realized she did not want to be alone. She grabbed Quasar by the wrist and tugged for her to follow. Quasar resisted and said she did not want to leave the others but relented when the dread on Eva’s face was evident. They went back down to the bottom hall away from the windows. Eva sat on the floor and covered her ears to avoid hearing the constant barrage of thunder.
“Eva, I think it’s normal,” Quasar said, sounding unsure of her own words. She sat to console her younger clone twin.
The sights and sounds of the storm were not normal to Eva having spent her whole life in the dead calm of space. Before resigning that the adults had more experience, she realized they were witnessing their first storm also. The difference was they were watching in awe while she was afraid. Her latent memories seemed unreal, more confusing than helpful in hardening her from the previous experience of her predecessors. Her fear turned to regret because she was not raised to be weak-minded and lacking of courage.
The storm lasted a long time. Eventually the light started to break through the clouds. Daytime arrived although the suns were not visible. The wind continued, and the trees in the forest tilted at an angle amid its force. When they stood up straight once more, the doors were opened.
…
There was work to be done before the sweltering heat of the late day was upon them. The waterfall was a two-hour walk away, and it was determined to be their best chance of long-term fresh water supply. The water of Tar Lake was dark with sediment and dissolved solids, while the feeds from the mountain streams were clear and better suited for a drinking supply. Eva listened while it was discussed in the cavern under the lander. About forty people were gathered to make the trek to the waterfall. Nikolaj addressed the gathering.
“We have to think about our long-term survival. In another generation, we will have lost our ability to fly Taurus and to do it now would be risky. Our days in space are over. This is it. This planet is the best it’s ever going to be. If you ask me, it’s not bad. Not perfect, but not bad. We have water we need to harness. That’s the priority. We need to grow food, too. We need to figure out some construction materials and for that we need to collect what we can from the Gambler remains. We have lots to do, but we need to focus on them in the right order. First is the water. After we develop some way to recover fresh water, we will go exploring and go to Gambler.”
Webster chimed in, “The seasons haven’t changed yet. It is going to get colder. We don’t know by how much.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Nikolaj nodded and continued, “But for now, we are lucky enough to have Taurus for shelter. We can make full use of the reactors if necessary for heat. For cooling, that’s another issue. Right now, we can still use the chillers on Taurus. But we need to explore.”
“Why do you think flying Taurus is risky? I think I can still do it with little help and the benefit outweighs the risk,” Ensign said. He was the only full-time pilot remaining among the survivors, trained in the workings of Taurus and the delicate balance of flying with the gravity shields.
“Imprecise moves could hurtle the vessel out of the atmosphere never to return with the gravity shields activated,” Nikolaj said, “and that’s only the beginning. Any failure that risks our only shelter is not worth it.”
Ensign frowned at the vote of no confidence in his ability as a pilot, but Nikolaj ignored him. The meeting was adjourning while a small party assembled to walk to the waterfall.
Eva followed Nikolaj and Webster along with some others to the waterfall. The walk was slightly uphill, a very steady and slow incline on the plateau that bordered the lakeside cliffs. They arrived at the waterfall and looked down as it flowed from the mountains and poured with great force onto the lake below. The rumbling sent vibration through Eva’s body like she had not felt since Gambler fired its engines to slow for the approach to Beta.
Webster questioned rhetorically, “We knew there was water here, but who would have expected this?” Everyone knew that Taurus honed in on a beacon left by probes centuries before Gambler left Earth. They had not found that beacon, and Eva heard some earlier speculation that it was in the lake, but it didn’t really matter. They were pondering how to collect from the raging fall.
After a short pause Webster said, “We could siphon from the river down to Taurus, but we don’t have the materials to build a pipeline.”
Nikolaj and the others nodded in silence. One of the others suggested launching Taurus and landing it again just up the hill there by the falls. Nikolaj dismissed that idea.
“We can reroute the water. We’ll have to dig a little bit at a time, making a trench from here back to Taurus,” Nikolaj suggested.
Webster kicked the ground as he listened. The ground under his feet was rocky, and he looked up to Nikolaj.
“Explosives,” blurted Eva.
Nikolaj looked at her and smiled. It was the first time he had ever done that. “Can we make some?” Nikolaj inquired of Webster.
Webster thought for a moment and said, “Yes, I think so. We need to go to Gambler. Fuel cells.”
Eva was tired on the walk back to Taurus and slowed behind the others. They did not wait. The hike to Gambler would come soon.
Chapter 33
Nikolaj waited until the cool morning of the next betaday to start the journey. He did not want to take all of the strongest and leave the weak, so he requested that Webster stay behind. They argued about it for a while, and the argument seemed to end about the time Quasar said she was going to stay behind by Taurus to help the others. Nikolaj assured him they could gather what they needed.
Eva wanted to go, but this time he wouldn’t let her. The walk was going to take at least the better part of the cool portion of the day. There was danger in being stranded without shelter toward the end of their day, but he took a calculated risk that somewhere in the mountains they could at minimum find some shade.
Only twenty remained at camp. Some of them were sick. Eva felt a little uneasy at the thought of half the group being separated, but Quasar and Webster remained, so that made her feel a little better.
There was a thick fog over the lake that day. The vapor spread across the lands in the chilly weather. The moisture from the storm left the air soupy and wet like some hybrid state of atmosphere in between liquid and gas.
Webster took a cot from under Taurus. Eva followed him. He looked in a hurry, like he did not want to be bothered, so she stayed at a quiet distance. Webster was trying to carry too much and left a trail of debris consisting mostly of branches he gathered from the forest. They emerged from the cavern across the rocky surface by the lake and descended down through one of the passages to the shore. He dropped the inflatable mattress on the ground beside the remaining pile of branches and vines he collected.
Eva could barely resist the urge to ask what he was doing, but she just watched thinking it would be made apparent soon enough. After making an arrangement of vines on the sands, he lined the branches up in a row across the vines and placed another layer of shorter branches over them in a crosshatched pattern. Then he placed the bed on top. He likewise arranged branches on top of the bed and threw the vines across. He tied the vines in knots.
When he started dragging the apparatus to the water, Eva could see his purpose, although she still did not understand his motivation. He had made a raft. With another branch in his hand, he walked the raft into the water getting his legs wet in the cold, murky liquid. He stood on top of it and pushed his way out into the water.
The device became unstable. Sinking partially, the beams in the raft became loose and the vines came undone. The branches floated alongside him as he started to lose his balance. He fell into the cold water, still not above head level. He stood up uttering words Eva had never heard and stormed out of the lake, towing what was left of his contraption.
